Movie fans among those reading this article might well be familiar with a film called Up In The Air which starred George Clooney – one of my favourite actors, might I add – playing out the role of a, wait for it, ‘transition consultant’. In this movie it was the responsibility of George’s character – who was employed by a big consultancy firm – to fly around recession-hit America firing unwitting – and mostly random folks – on behalf of their, well, jittery – some might say pusillanimous – employers. These, well, pusillanimous employers had given lucrative contracts to George’s firm – some obscure management consultancy turned roving elite firing squad – to do their dirty work for them. George was one of a number of transition consultants at his firm who would be dispatched to carry out their dastardly deeds, deeds which were far, far from swift and easy to undertake because of the increasingly volatile nature of the individuals George and his cadre would encounter upon their travels. Can you imagine one day going into work, only to be summoned to some sealed off conference room as soon as you’re settled at your desk awaiting your coffee, to be unceremoniously engaged by some completely inconspicuous – yet obscure and sometimes even strange – individual to be told by the foregoing that your position at your – now former – company no longer exists and that you will, henceforth, be on some scrapheap unless, of course, you don’t begin your quest for an alternative livelihood, like, now? (Well, perhaps not in those specific terms.)
Anyway, this story – allow me to apprise you – is not about George or Up In The Air. This story is about a real life transition consultant who, for two years, was contracted all over the great and historical City of London to dispatch some of the most benign, frightful, taciturn, outspoken, refined, uncouth, disheveled, and classy people working for all kinds of public and private sector enterprises in the Year of Our Lord 2010: this story is about me: the author of this very article you here now peruse. Becoming a transition consultant (or to use a flagrantly inappropriate term: a butcher) was not something I had never – never – thought of doing even in my most cynical bursts of imaginative creativity. Like love – or so they tell me – it just happened. But, allow me to correct my seemingly erroneous rendering of the term ‘love’ here mentioned: this newly adopted vocation of mine was a most unlovely one, and one which I was pushed into doing at the time because of the pervasive, sapping, and pernicious recession that hit us – the unwitting proletariat – much like a modern day Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in 2008; but, thankfully, without the atomic payload. It all started in the Fall of 2007 when the private sector company I was working for began a very novel and interesting – or so it seemed at the time – in-house marketing campaign, entitled ‘THINK BIG’. It was all quite unexpected and very, very random to suddenly initiate a campaign of this sort in the midst of all that was going on at the time: like all decent and sinister horror movie plots: it didn’t make sense – not initially, anyway.
So what was this THINK BIG slogan all about? We had mugs, coasters, stationary, t-shirts, badges – all embossed or imprinted with this so very motivational expression in bold yellow capital lettering on a blue background, and yet no explanation about the rationale behind it. Then came the conference. In Communist Russia, or in the very early days of Red China – though it remains distinctly red contemporaneously – the Bolshevik cadres had novel ways of using propaganda to aid their communication efforts in relaying subliminal – and in some cases direct – messages to the unsuspecting proletariat masses. It was the same with Goebbels, the infamous – but sadly effective – Nazi propagandist during Hitler’s ominous reign. My company, it seemed facetiously to me at the time, had taken several leave
